Android P Beta is available today

10th May 2018

There was plenty of talk about Android P at today’s big I/O kickoff — but when can you actually download the thing? Right now, as a matter of fact, if you’ve got one of a handful of compatible handsets. You can find the upgrade here, if you dare.

The list includes the Pixel, naturally, but the company’s also partnering with a whole bunch of third-party developers, to allow a lot more users to try an early build of the mobile operating system. The list includes handsets from Nokia, Vivo, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Sony, Essential and Oppo. It’s a pretty broad spectrum of handsets, though there are some key absences here, including, notably, Samsung, HTC, LG and Huawei.

The new version of the operating system includes a number of visual upgrades, a change over the Oreo’s additions, which were largely in the backend. There are also some key new gesture based functions, putting Android more inline with recent updates to iOS for the iPhone X and the new Adaptive Battery feature, which gets more juice out of existing hardware by throttling power on under used apps.